Superfund 365is a tour de force of data visualization design, artist-scientist collaboration and political subversion. Created by artist Brooke Singer to capture the 365 worst Superfund sites, one day at a time, from September 1, 2007 through August 31, 2008, the website exposes the complexity of the nation’s toxic waste problem to a general audience. Though its one-year run is over, the site is a graphic example of how the digital arts can elucidate and inform, and remains an accessible, on-line archive ripe for exploration and personal commentary.

The term Superfund is probably unknown to most Americans in their 30’s or younger. For the rest of us, it likely evokes images of Love Canal, a neighborhood in the LaSalle area of Niagara Falls, NY, that was built atop 20,000 tons of toxic waste, or the Valley of the Drums in Bullitt County, Kentucky, where thousands of drums of industrial wastes were buried on one 23 acre site. In response to growing concerns about toxic sites, their threat to human health, and the cost of cleaning them, Congress enacted the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act(CERCLA), or the Superfund Law, as it is more commonly known.

The Hudson River, contaminated for decades with toxic waste from the General Electric manufactruing plants along its banks, is the longest Superfund hazardous waste site in the United States, stretching for over 40 miles. Image credit: NASA, Christopher G. Reuther/EHP, as presented on Superfund 365.

One of the more famous Superfund sites in the nation is the General Electric PCB site on the Hudson River, EarthDesk’s home river.

Superfund created a process for identifying sites, established a National Priorities List (NPL), and implemented a trust fund — a Superfund — to assure clean ups could be paid for. It also empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to compel responsible parties to perform cleanups or to reimburse the government for cleanups conducted by the EPA. Unfortunately, the petroleum industry tax, which originally funded the program, ended in 1995, and funding by Congress cannot keep pace with the cost of cleaning up hazardous sites. There is more information from EPA on Superfund, its history, status and funding here.

Brooke Singer’s goal in creating Superfund 365 was to transform the dense text of CERCLA’s Superfund webpages and database into a visually engaging and useful environment that encouraged exploration. The challenge that she and her workers faced was to piece together EPA data that was at times complex, inconsistent, inaccurate, and inhomogeneous.

In addition to the NPL, they employed the Center for Public Integrity’s list of the Most Dangerous Superfund Sites, as an aid in organizing and prioritizing this data. They narrowed their list to 365 sites by eliminating sites where data was inconclusive and sites that were no longer on the NPL. Next, they plotted selected sites on a map, and planned a cross-country trek of Superfund site visits beginning in the New York City area, working across cross country, finally ending the year at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

A pinwheel graph displays contaminants, surrounded by pointers representing the entities responsible for their presence. When a mouse is placed over a pointer, a popup exposes the type of contaminant. Executing a mouse click on a pointer launches a descriptive webpage from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) for that substance. A timeline across the bottom of each page displays actions taken for the featured site. And a horizontal bar chart highlights the ethnicity distribution in the site’s zip code, annotated with the population within ten miles and the average income in the area. Beyond graphical interactions, viewers may engage the website by entering comments and uploading photos.

On a higher plane, Superfund365 positions the audience in relation to environmental threat. Toxic ranking scores, site photos, and demographic descriptions of populations potentially at risk put viewers on the map, making them residents of the places that Dow Chemical, GE, and hundreds more, have ruined. Singer’s work falls naturally within the tradition of politically motivated art that seeks to stimulate debate, and potentially provoke social and political change.

Since Superfund365 was introduced, more sites such as the New York City’s Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek continue to be added to the Superfund list. Today, Brook Singer has taken to photographing Superfund sites as part of a book project (see Gowanus Canal below) while continuing to practice her art of social activism. At a time when there is increasing public knowledge about chemicals in consumer products, there is decreasing knowledge about the actual environment itself. And with one in four Americans living within four miles of a Superfund site, it is time for a reawakening to environmental issues. A good place to begin is Superfund365.

Featured Faculty

Inspired by new scientific studies of the human body as a metabiome, Dr. Dupuis reimagines the American body politic through a new metaphor — digestion — opening social transformations to ideas of mixing, fermentation, and collaboration. In doing so, she explores how social activists can rethink politics as inclusive processes that involve the inherently risky mixing of cultures, standpoints, and ideas.

Peconic Bay has a rich sense of place built over the course of centuries. There is surprising depth to its history and Marilyn’s telling of it . . . while also performing the historian’s duty to link that history to the present day. She sees an America imprinted by its past and challenged by its future, and a people still wondering, “whether humans can live in peace and harmony with the natural environment and . . . with our fellow human beings on a global level.” From the Introduction by John Cronin.

EarthDesk Categories

Gen En Campaign

The Gen En Campaign is about the pillars of our energy future. Launched by Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies it will spend the year examining energy as know it today -- and how to make our lives simpler, our travels swifter, and our technology smarter.

We are Gen En because our time is now. We focus on energybecause it is both our challenge and our opportunity; environment because real-world solutions take into account sustainability and well-being; entrepreneurship because we cannot create an energy future with an antiquated portfolio engagementbecause powering the future necessitates a global community of citizens taking part.

FoodYou

Pace Academy’s FoodYou Campaign is about the way that our choices, as individuals and as a society, intersect with the environment. During this 2013-2014 awareness initiative, we will examine some of the many pieces that are set in motion by what we put on our plates. Through events and partnerships, the campaign will broaden the Pace community’s understanding of our global food system. We’ll be talking about the FoodYou engineer, grow, kill, need, take, waste, trade, and share. Watch for updates about the developing campaign here.

Walkin’ the Walk

As part of Pace Academy's 007 Campaign, 120 Pace University students and faculty marched a mile with buckets of water on their heads, in solidarity with those in the developing world who must retrieve water for their families through difficult circumstances.For the students’ efforts, $5,000 was donated to Engineers Without Borders to create a community water well in Tanzania. More about the 007 campaign . . .

11170 days 18 hours 24 minutes 15 seconds

since the Federal Clean Water Act's 1985 goal
to eliminate the discharge of pollutants